


The World at Large

by Azmera



Series: The Dynamite Club [3]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/F, F/M, Self-Discovery, walking the earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 17:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14720747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azmera/pseuds/Azmera
Summary: I know that starting over is not what life's about, but my thoughts were so loud I couldn't hear my mouth.





	The World at Large

She boards a ship from Harbor City to Kyoshi Island. She charms the deckhands into explaining their jobs, and by the time they make port she’s got calluses to match theirs, if not the same muscles. She leaves anyway: the ship moves in a simple loop, Kyoshi Island to Harbor City and back. She doesn’t want to smell the salt and ice and oil and seaweed, to think about the midnight sun shining on the glaciers, about her parents’ tired eyes, about the White Lotus and blue-white walls ten feet high. She wants sun-baked clay and new spring grass, undulating fields of wheat, heat-shimmer over paving stones.

She spends a week in Kyoshi Island. Their reverence for the Avatar hasn’t faded, but she doesn’t want to see the hope in people’s eyes. Kyoshi glares down at her, everything she hates about the Avatar title: commanding and cold and detached from the world, convinced of her superiority, arrogant in her isolationism, authoritarian beyond all reasoning.

She boards a ship bound for Zhuhai. The streets are crowded and smelly, dirty with the crush of migrants, thousands seeking new lives and opportunities away from the heat and dust of the Earth Kingdom. She works, for a while, in the local Sato plant, living in a crowded apartment block, sleeping on a thin mattress in a room with three others. Dinner is communal, a mishmash of cultures and accents, northern Kingdom food made by Southern Tribe women, Fire Nation decor on the walls; Fire Nation prayers said over Ba Sing Se jook; all twelve of them in the kitchen/dining room at once, eating and laughing and sharing their stories. And it starts to feel comfortable, until she tears her hand open and, in quick succession, loses her job, loses her home, loses her savings. She moves on quickly after that: she has nothing to give to (or to gain from) a third-rate port city in the southern Republic.

She walks, most days. Sometimes if she’s feeling ambitious she practices the earth waves Aang described Toph making, a lifetime ago and half a world away, as they raced towards Ba Sing Se to save Master Katara. When she’s truly alone, when she hasn’t seen another traveller for days on end, she works on her airbending. She lifts herself above the road on a whirling ball of air, and imagines that she can hear Aang’s delighted laughter.

Through it all there’s something under her skin, an itching restlessness, that she can’t shake.

She considers crossing the Si Wong Desert: there are places in the world where boundaries become fluid, where enlightenment can be found. But she has no water, no compass, no map, and no desire to learn sandbending. Instead she skirts the edges of the desert, marvelling at the dunes, the stars, the vast emptiness.

She hikes through the Kolau mountains, makes her way into Omashu. The restlessness explodes into full-blown rage when she sees a man hold a dagger of flame to a woman’s throat and push her into an alley. She follows, her footfalls airbender-light and earthbender-strong, and leaves him a smear on the bricks. The woman, shaking, agrees not to speak of it.

(She can’t be seen. They’d never let her escape again.)

The shadows seem to curl towards her after that, whispering the horrors they’ve witnessed, the crimes they’ve hidden.

She takes to watching for police, so that she can leave criminals alive and for the police to find. But then: an officer tails a gaunt man with bread tucked into his too-baggy shirt, until he slams him against the wall and arrests him for theft. Two children, dark-skinned and golden-eyed, are harassed as they lounge in a park. A smirking, green-eyed boy surfs down the mail chutes, disrupting the workers’ careful schedule, and the officers simply shake their heads and laugh as the workers pick up the disrupted packages. A crowd gathered peacefully outside of a factory’s gates petitions their employers for higher wages, for better safety conditions. The police arrive with wolf-hounds and steel and corral the protesters into waiting vans, and the Chief of police shakes hands with the factory owner when he thinks they’ve all gone.

She leaves, the walls of the city too thin to contain her rage but too strong to destroy. (For now.) She stops watching for police, watches for criminals instead.

And she realizes: they don’t act on their own. When she stops a man from stealing a bag of gold, his hands shake and his torn sleeves reveal the shadows of track marks. She watches a girl press a needle into the crook of her elbow, and follows her until she disappears into a crumbling apartment block, hears shouts and the shatter of breaking china. She sees a boy smash a window to huddle in an abandoned factory, and in the light reflected by the snow-heavy clouds she can just barely make out the shadow of bruises around his neck. She tracks a man to work who beats his wife, and sees his supervisor snarling at him to _move it, or I’ll have you out on the street_. Nothing happens in a vacuum. (Does that justify their actions? She isn’t sure. But it explains them.)

She moves on. She’s no one important. She can’t do anything to help these people. Even if she were the Avatar— she’s one girl against the whole world.

At night, she dreams of temples above the clouds. Of flags shredded by the breeze to carry away prayers, bells ringing to signal the evening meal, lemurs congregating under the apple-peach tree, pai sho played in sunlit cells.

 _I was one against the world_ , Aang says. _I did much to help those who had nothing, but there were many things I was blind to. And I do, now, regret some of my actions._

 _You were...wrong?_ She says, not looking at her predecessor. Instead, she watches a lemur leap onto her teacher’s head, and she feels her chest ache for something she never knew. Something she will never know, now.

 _I lacked perspective. I missed the flock for the birds, as they say._ She doesn’t know where they say that, but she figures it’s irrelevant. _There are many things that you can’t see when you’re a part of them_ , he clarifies. _I could only see what I knew. But death brings clarity, in a way that life doesn’t. Lines are erased. Your vision… broadens._ He pauses, watches the multicolored flags flutter in the breeze. _Don’t ever think you’re powerless. No-one’s powerless._

Something flickers through her mind, a whisper of Kyoshi’s memory, tinged with regret and disdain all at once. The roar of a crowd, a mass of people swarming the walls of the Earth King’s palace. It had happened before, peasants upsetting the old order.

 _She didn’t like change_ , Aang allows. _She wasn’t… well, she was Earth by nature. We are not._

 _We?_ She says, softly, almost inaudibly. Aang was many things, but she never took him for a revolutionary.

Mischief flickers through his grin for a second. _You never saw me in my youth. Throwing fruit pies at the elders was the least of my antics._ He grows more serious. _But I am a part of you, Korra, no matter what. And I will be with you for every step of this journey._

She wakes in the shelter she’d hastily earthbent for herself, tears in her eyes and a lightness in her heart.

* * *

She continues. There’s not much else for her to do.

She listens to Aang more, now. He’s got a lot of good advice, even if some of it seems a bit suspect. (Boil the strange plant for tea? Really?) But more often, it is indispensable. He tells her how to hide, how to dodge, how to be unseen even in plain sight.

She moves through the world, watching, listening. If she’s going to do this, she’s doing it _right_. No half-baked schemes, no charging into situations without information. She’s going to understand what’s happening, and why, before she changes things. Being on the run has taught her that much, at least.

* * *

She falls in with a band of migrant workers, three women and two men. Strength in numbers and all that, she tells herself, but the truth is she’s lonely, with only long-dead spirits for company. She trades jokes and tea and her waterbending abilities for shelter and food and companionship, stories of the road and places she’s never seen, advice on getting by in a world that only wants them for as long as they’re useful. They weigh the (scant) merits of different jobs: the relative freedom of field work, the regularity of the factory line, the companionship of dish-rooms. They share horror stories and she commiserates, shows them the scar on the side of her palm.

For all they know, she’s Korra, half-water orphan girl from Zhuhai. Named for the Avatar to give her luck, for all the good it did. A migrant like them. Left behind by society. (But she _wasn’t_ , she thinks, miserably. She could be free of this life if she wanted.)

One of the workers is her age. Sen, fifteen, green-eyed and cheerful, orphaned after a factory fire, now travelling with his aunt and uncle. A storyteller, a mythmaker, his aunt calls him, always spinning events into the most outrageous version of themselves. He follows her like a koala-puppy, inordinately pleased when he can make her laugh. _You’ve got a beautiful laugh,_ he says to her one night, by the fire, and she smiles at him, because it feels like there’s a miniature sun inside of her, when he says that sort of thing.

Another night, over baijiu snuck from his aunt’s bags, he confesses, _I think I love you, Korra_.

Something seizes in her heart, something she can’t name. Later, as he sleeps by the fire, she shoulders her pack and vanishes into the darkness.

* * *

She’s sixteen, and Roku pushes past Aang to tell her she needs to learn firebending. Proper firebending, he says scornfully, not the half-baked excuse for spark-throwing the White Lotus showed her.

She half-remembers humid, weed-choked temples and ancient stones, the sun flickering iridescent blue-black on scales, a swirling vortex of flame. _Bakong_ echoes in her mind, though none of the lives she’s spoken to ever learned the city’s name. Aang shows her the way, and she bows to the Sun Warriors, and climbs the steps to the masters.

The eternal flame is cupped like a heartbeat in her hands. Ran and Shaw watch her, the fire reflected in their leonine eyes. And they begin to dance.

She matches their steps, sparking the eternal flame into the steps of the form, and they crouch next to her. And they breathe.

The fire is warm, like sunlight, like Katara’s smile, like the earth on a summer night. Violet and green and bright blue flicker through the golden flames, and it feels _right_. Like something sliding into place, something that she didn’t know was missing. Something that the White Lotus never could have taught her.

Her eyes are wet. She brushes away tears, bows to the Masters and then to the Warriors.

Her fire is stronger after that, lighter, gold at the edges and almost white at the center of her blasts, and it’s easier than it ever has been. _Fire is life_ , she’d known, had heard it a thousand times in a thousand ways from her various lives, her mediocre teachers, but she’s never understood in the way she does now. It’s a part of her, natural as breathing.

* * *

She dreams of a windswept steppe, bison grazing peacefully under an autumn sun.

 _This was the way the Nomads were, three thousand years ago,_ the Avatar before her says. She’s beautiful, strikingly so, with wide slate-colored eyes and chestnut hair that falls in gentle waves to her shoulders, her forehead shaved just enough to bare the arrow tattoo. She’s tall and thin, but willowy. _I was Avatar Altani._

 _I’ve never heard of you,_ she says, not meeting the other woman’s eyes. _I’m sorry_.

She can hear the smile in Altani’s voice as she says, _Don’t be. It is the natural way of the world: three thousand years have passed, and my people have suffered a great loss. Even so, there have been more Avatars than there are stars in the sky, Korra, and I am not so conceited as to think myself worthy of eternal remembrance._

She watches the bison graze. Nomads in the distance practice with bows and arrows, the arrows curving against the wind. _Why did you bring me here?_

 _In my time, a man sought to subdue the entire world. To put every nation under his heel, to bend heaven itself to his whim._ The scene shifts: Omashu, burning. A man standing before the city, a bald man with airbender tattoos. He turns, his cloak rippling in the wind, smiles. His eyes are the same color as Altani’s. _My brother, Yesugei._ He holds out his hand. _He offered me a place by his side. He offered me power, glory, wealth beyond measure. He told me that he needed me, that we were meant to rule together._

 _So…_ she asks, dreading the answer, _what did you do?_

Lightning forks across the sky. The earth shakes and trembles and splits, and Yesugei takes flight, away from the Avatar’s rage, and turns to call down a storm in return. _I refused._ Altani’s voice is bitter. _We fought, and every blow we traded felt like I was striking myself twice over._ The battle rages before them, and she watches as the Avatar, eyes glowing, gathers lightning and strikes, again and again and again, at the glider-borne nomad, watches as the would-be tyrant dodges, nimble as a sparrow.

Until he doesn’t. Lightning crackles around him and he falls from the sky, unmoving, his glider burning, and the light goes out of Altani’s eyes as she rushes to catch him. The scene fades as Altani cradles his lifeless body, but she can still feel the echo of despair in her chest.

 _Korra, you must know that the path you would walk will not be easy._ They’ve returned to the steppe from before. _If you would tear down the empires that men have built, if you would extend a hand to those who have been held down, there will be many who try to oppose you. Some will be your family, your friends. The ones you love. You need to decide, now, if what you believe is worth losing them. If you would do this, you need to be certain— beyond any shadow of a doubt— that you will let nothing stop you._

* * *

She wakes with a hollow feeling in her chest.

Her father is the chief of the Southern Water Tribe. Her uncle is the chief of the Northern Water Tribe. Eventually, she will have to address that.

In the present, though…

 _I need to learn to bend lightning_ , she says, the next time Aang surfaces.

He freezes, tries to talk her out of it. Tries to explain— lightning is dangerous, lightning is deadly. He vanishes, eventually.

They argue like that for a month. He appears, and tries to convince her, and she ignores him, and he vanishes. She works on farms, warehouses, docks, dishrooms. Auto shops, though she’s got no mechanical knowledge. Kitchens, though she’s a lousy cook. Wherever she can, as long as it pays. She hops from island to island, because there just isn’t much work now that the factories have gone to the Kingdom. She sleeps in hostels when she’s lucky, in spare rooms or barns when she’s not, on the beach or under trees when she’s really hard up.

Eventually, on the cliffs of a forgettable island, Aang reappears. _You were right_ , he says. _I was being… stubborn._ He sighs. _But if you want to learn lightning_ properly _, there’s only one person who can teach you._

* * *

Azula is ancient. Her eyes are sunken but still gleam bright topaz, calculating and cold. A permanent scowl is etched onto her face by the wrinkles, but she doesn’t miss the way the woman’s eyes narrow when she sees her. Azula sees her as prey.

Azula is _fast_ , and strong, and vicious as ever.

She remembers Aang’s stories of skating down the chutes of Omashu, running from blue fire. Of dancing away from precise flame-strikes on top of a moving drill. She’s not fast enough, she thinks, and instead punches straight through the first fireball Azula throws with a burst of white-gold fire and enough force to blast the woman off her feet.

She knows better than to fall for the piteous-old-woman act, and as Azula picks herself up her sneer is, she thinks, tinged with approval.

“So the Avatar can learn,” she says, brushing dust from her sleeves. “But what does the Avatar want with an ancient woman, left behind by the world to molder in a backwater hamlet like this?”

“I need to learn to bend lightning,” she says. “And I don’t trust anyone else to not screw it up.”

Appeal to her vanity, Aang had told her. Tell her that she is the only one— it’s not a total lie.

“Hmph.” A moment’s warning is all she has, the taste of ozone and the hairs rising on the back of her neck, before lightning arcs towards her, blue-white, and thank the spirits she learned to redirect it at least, _catch in down up out throw_ to the trees that explode with the force of it. “Passable.” Ancient eyes flick over her, dismissive. “Where have you been living, a barn?”

“Sometimes,” she says, because why hide it. “Better a barn than a prison.”

Azula’s nod is sharp. She turns back to her hut. “Well, hurry up. You interrupted my lunch.”

* * *

Lightning is not fire. Lightning is not life.

Lightning is cold, and deadly, and beautiful in a way nothing else is. It is clarity of mind, pure action, a decision made and carried through. There is no _wait_ or _but_ or _what if_ with lightning. There is only _yes_ and _now_.

* * *

The Fire Nation isn’t rotten to the core in the way the Earth Kingdom is. The nobles are fat and lazy, of course, and the peasants are poor and hungry. But they seem genuinely ignorant of each others’ circumstances. In the Earth Kingdom, nobles would sniff in disdain at the peasants scratching a living from the dirt, would sneer at the street-sweepers and the cleaners and the cooks. Here, the nobles despair over the plight of Earth Kingdom peasants, not noticing as their own destitute wait on them hand and foot.

She isn’t sure if that’s better or worse.

“Is it better,” she asks one night, tipsy on cheap soju, “to be a bad person in ignorance, or to be honest about your bad-ness?”

The girl she’s talking to, Emin, amber-eyed and porcelain-skinned, laughs. “Why be either?”

“What if you don’t have a choice?” She finds her mood shifting, abruptly. She _chose_ to leave Sen that night. Her decisions are hers alone, and she has to own them, Kuruk taught her that much. But she can still hate herself for them, can’t she? Regret them until the moose-yaks come home and the spirit-lights return to the sky? The Avatars are gone, drowned by soju and Emin’s pretty smile in the firelight and the endless regrets she carries. She’s not sure who to turn to for advice. She doesn’t have anyone else. “What if the way you were born makes you a bad person? Inherently?” Is she, the Avatar, doomed to be an unjust authority figure? What if her fighting is pointless, what if she can’t do anything to change her nature?

Emin rolls her eyes. “Is this the part where you confess you have a dark secret? You’re actually a princess, or some sort of corrupt oil magnate’s daughter, or the Avatar?”

She chokes on her soju, tries to cover it with a laugh. “Y-yeah, the Avatar. Good one.”

“And anyway,” Emin says, blithely unaware, “I don’t think it matters. If you’re bad, you’re bad, but it’s _actions_ that matter.” Emin squints at her. “Y’were talking about the nobles, right? Earth ‘n Fire?” She nods, unable to shake the near-recognition. “Hey, look, a noble’s a noble. And they’re all _shit_.” Emin gestures with her drink, emphatically, and a bit of the liquid inside sloshes onto the counter. She bites her cheek, her fingers twitching to stop it, but does nothing. Emin continues, caught up in her own rhetoric, a spark of _something_ in her eyes. “Doesn’t matter how good they are. They’ll all get the wall in the end, eh?”

“I hear ya!” the man to her right shouts, and she wants to deck him, the way he’s looking at Emin. Emin’s glare is enough to drive him off, she thinks.

She starts to continue the conversation, but then Emin abruptly pulls her into a kiss, and she forgets where she was headed.

* * *

Emin’s squatting in an abandoned beach house with four other people, and it’s— cozy. They’ve all got their own rooms, but they’re joined together by a second-story balcony that wraps around the whole house, and on hot nights (which is most when she first arrives, in the summer) they sleep out on the balcony, staying up late and sharing stories and laughing together.

They think she’s Korra, all water for all her father knew, abandoned when she started throwing sparks. Not a complete lie. (But enough of one.)

It’s late at night. The stars blaze above her, and the moon hangs almost-full on the horizon. One of the very few perks of squatting on a pre-electricity island: no light pollution. It’s cool enough tonight that everyone is in their rooms, though the windows are open. (Autumn is fast approaching, she thinks. Season of storms. Season of change.) Emin is a light sleeper, but she’s on the other side of the house— in the adjoining room, Kyou and Shen both sleep like logs. She’s as alone as she’s going to get, here.

She sits, letting her feet dangle over the edge of the balcony, and rests her chin on the low railing. She breathes out, and in, and out again. And she shouts, into the space in her soul that is the others, _HELP._

Aang rises obligingly, one eyebrow raised. _You don’t normally summon us. What’s wrong?_

His voice— the echo of his voice in her skull, maybe, the memory of her own voice when it was his, who knows— is full of fatherly concern, so warm and caring it brings tears to her eyes. “I don’t know,” she says, and squeezes her eyes shut. “I don’t _know_! I’m just so— I’m— I _can’t_ — I’m so _tired_ of lying to people,” she sobs, scrubbing uselessly at her eyes. “I just _can’t_ — I _love_ Emin, and I can’t hurt her the way I hurt Sen, I can’t _do_ that again! I can’t— I can’t do it again.” It feels like someone’s tearing open her chest, ripping these noises out of her, because she’s never cried like this before. “I’m just so _tired_ of it all, and I want— I want—” _I want go home_ , she almost says.

But she doesn’t really have a home. Not since the White Lotus took her in. Not since her parents gave her up to a prison of ice miles away from the nearest village. Not since Naga died that night.

“I’m so _tired_ , Aang,” she mutters, swiping at her closed eyes. “I just want to _stop_.”

His concern is sharper now, almost wary. _Korra_ , he says slowly, _are you… I mean, do you— that is…_

Kyoshi’s low, cool voice cuts in: _He wants to know if you’re suicidal._ A pause. She still has her eyes closed, but she imagines she can see Aang glaring at Kyoshi. _What. You were coddling the girl._

“I’m not, Aang,” she mutters. And then, with all the bitterness and resentment she can muster, “And go _away_ , Kyoshi.”

 _Girl_ , Kyoshi says, with an authoritative snap to her voice that makes her instantly sit up, if only to glare, _I know you’ve never liked me. Well, fine. I don’t like you. I think you went stir-crazy locked up down there in the ice, and if you ask me the White Lotus should’ve killed you when you tried to run. But they didn’t, and you’re the Avatar. And_ that’s _not something you can run from— spirits know a lot of us have tried. The world needs you. You need to stop moping around on backwater islands and get to the problems that you’ve let fester—_

 _Kyoshi!_ Kuruk shouts, his presence on the deck like a cold gust of wind. _Stop that! Korra is—_

 _An_ adult _, and I won’t have you coddling her just because she’s crying and she reminds you of the daughter you never had—_

_Oh, that’s rich, coming from the worst mother this side of the spirit world—_

Her head is pounding, all of the memories in her skull threatening to crack her open and spill out onto the balcony, as her past lives shout at each other, and she just— she just wants them all to— ” _Shut up!_ ”

The argument in her head disappears abruptly, the silence in its wake ringing like a thunderclap.

She looks out at the ocean, at the moon reflected on the water. She could walk in. Just… walk in, and not come back. It would be peaceful there, underwater, and she wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else. Wouldn’t have to lie, to argue, to fight with anyone down there. Wouldn’t have to live in this world of inequality and heartbreak. Quiet and dark, just the fish for company.

Aang’s memory of concern stirs.

“Don’t worry, Aang,” she mutters, wiping tears away from her eyes. “I won’t. I’m just thinking.”

“About what?”

Emin’s voice startles her enough that she bangs her knee on the railing and nearly flips over it in her haste to stand.

Emin ducks out onto the balcony. “Wow, don’t get up on my behalf.” Then her focus shifts, just a bit, and her eyes narrow, and she says, “You were crying.”

Useless to deny it, she thinks, and says, “Yeah. I just— got homesick.”

“Oh.” Emin crosses her arms, leans against the wall, looks out over the water, her expression more guarded than she’s seen it since the night they met. “I heard you talking, you know. I noticed. Aang, Kyoshi, _Korra_ , they’ve all got one thing in common.”

Her blood runs cold. Her hands shake. She tries to think of something to say, fails. Settles for, “Oh.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

She swallows. It feels like there’s a rock in her stomach. “I. Uh.” She bites her lip, closes her eyes. “Yeah.” She sighs. “I’m the Avatar.”

It feels good to say it, oddly. She’s never hated that she is the Avatar, really, only hated what others did with that information. Hated the prison and the politicking and the condescending masters they brought in, the regimentation and the isolation and the grinding _routine_. And after she ran, she didn’t fear being the Avatar, either, only feared what would happen if she was found out. Feared what the White Lotus would do if they found her, what the governments of the world would do if they learned about her. What her friends would say, if they knew she was lying to them.

Emin lets out a breath. “Well. Okay. Get out.”

She opens her eyes. Emin is trembling, her mouth pressed into a thin line.

“You’re angry,” she says.

“Of course I’m fucking angry,” Emin says, her voice ice-cold. “You lied to me. You’re _the Avatar_. Fuck, I… I don’t know. Come back tomorrow, if you _have_ to, but.” She runs a hand over her face, sighs. “ _Spirits_ , Korra.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, feeling very small.

Emin laughs, a bitter noise that makes her feel even worse. “Yeah,” she says. “Well. So am I.”

* * *

She spends the night on the beach. The Avatars are far away, the stars blazing above her, and she lies awake with her self-loathing until she falls asleep sometime between moonset and dawn. The sunrise wakes her, and she watches the sun climb into the sky until her eyes water from the brightness. Then she shoulders her bag and finds a ship to the Republic to stow away on.

She’s learned enough. Now is the time for action.

No looking back.


End file.
